In the beginning, there were static web pages.

The geek masses cheered at the ability to put information on the web for everyone to see. More and more web pages were built, and with that, a myriad of useless information also began to pile. Search engines started emerging, with the aim of filtering valuable information from the heaps of useless data.

Then, websites started getting progressively more dynamic. Geeks wanted to jump-start their websites by allowing others to interact and participate. The average Joe wanted to be able to have a web presence and express themselves without needing to know HTML or other coding languages. The raw data kept piling.

Sometime in 2001, Jimmy Wales decided to launch a community emphasizing user contributions of structured, meaningful information. Wikipedia users classify their articles, sanity-check other articles, and relate their article to any other articles. Instead of searching through piles of articles, why not get users to incrementally improve each other's articles?

Every Wikipedia article starts off on the same page, no pun intended. To distinguish between different article types, template code is added into the article. If you wanted to add the current population for the "Roanoke, VA" article, you'd have to manually edit the "InfoBox" tag within the article's wiki source. More importantly, since the data is so loosely structured, there's no easy way to pinpoint other cities with a population similar to that of Roanoke, VA.

When information is ideally structured, much of the burden is taken off the search engine. Freebase aims at cauking Wikipedia's flaw by adding numerous "facets" to the search, as well as keeping the data in concise blocks in the database. Freebase claims to allow for deeper searches than ever possible before. Whereas Wikipedia's data structure is mainly fixed, Freebase has what is called an "Open Contribution Model". This means not only that different content types physically exist (without the META-ness) for different articles, but also that users can CREATE new content types, essentially extending the database structure. This concept of a dynamic database is something that has been virtually untapped until now.

Also, Freebase allows users to upload entire data sets, not just individual articles. Suppose I wanted to create a content type for "Squirrels who survived a rattlesnake attack", I would add fields like "Name, Animal type, Location, and Date". "Animal type" could automatically look-up the squirrel's scientific info from a separate content type, "Location" could either pull up other squirrels bitten at this location or the geographic/demographic details of this location, etc. The possibilities are limitless. Oh yeah, and there's an API and even a Query Editor, too.

To show how unbiased this database structure really is, try out this FilmSpin example. Even though it only uses 2 content types, it sleekly shows how meaningful those relationships can be among varying content types. Freebase is still in alpha, and shows great potential of taking the buzz away from Wikipedia and other sector rivals.